I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to do a whole party based off of one Simpsons joke.

Come hang with me and Joyride (and a tonne of other kool mates) this Sunday night. I know it can be difficult to celebrate Australia Day given what it represents but we are hoping to unite everyone in the celebration of a Simpsons episode set in Australia. How very 2014.

We’ll be playing the usual good time hits of rap, R&B and Earth Song, we might even throw in a few of the Alt Aussie bangers we grew up with. I’ve re-upped my Australia Day Mix from 2012, filled with local hits from the late 90s and early 00s to prepare you for such a possibility!

Happy Australia Day! I’ve been feeling fairly un-patriotic ever since my final laser session removed all traces of the Southern Cross tattoos on my neck, lower back and left buttock so I thought I’d put something super Oztrayan together to re-pledge my allegiance. Something that really puts the third ‘Aussie’ in ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie’ and the second ‘Oi’ in ‘Oi Oi Oi’. I needed to take a little trip back though, to a time where almost all the music I listened to was local produce, and boy oh boy did I fuckin’ love that shit. I’m talking about high school, which for me was 1997 – 2002. Instead of studying for 4 Unit English or hitting on girls you could catch me spending all my time listening to triple j on my ghettoblaster, my fingers patiently hovering over the red record button, ready to capture my new favourite songs from The Jebs, The ‘Spoon or The ‘Gurge so I could learn all the words before I saw them play at the all ages festival at St Ives skate park that weekend, where I’d be pretending that the 10 dexies my friend had stolen from his brother with ADD and shoved down my throat had really got me fucked up (they hadn’t).

This mix is a tribute to those days. If you went back in time and stole all my cassettes out of that walkman I won from the MS Read-A-Thon, they would probably sound exactly like this mix, except luckily bloody Tunny isn’t yammering over the top of all the tracks in my mix. I tried to include as many of my favourite songs from that era, all of them Australian. There are some glaring omissions but hey this was super fun to do so I’ll probably put together another volume for the next patriotic public holiday (Easter? Jesus was a digger right?).

Spray some water on your stereo and turn it up loud. Sing along to the songs you know and pray that Quan and Janet get back together one day. Explain to a younger cousin what Recovery was and pretend you never saw Garage Days. Happy Australia day mates. PS thanks heaps to @bobbygelato for drawing that amazing artwork on his computer machine!

– SOME MORE WORDZ –

Last month I was asked by Alex at Acclaim Magazine (who is awesome fyi) to put together an all-Australian mix for Australia Day. My first thought was to put something together of all the recent releases from young electronic Australian producers but that mix would probably just be Jonti’s recent free album with the tracks in a different order, so I needed to come up with a better idea. Obviously that idea was to go BACK IN TIME.

I was a huge fan of the RadioFriendlyUnit Shifter mixes that Nick Catchdubs put together with Mr Ducker for Mishka NYC. If you haven’t heard these amazing tributes to alternative music in the 90’s listen to all three of them now! They’re a fantastic, well mixed collection of time capsules to a better time (for ‘alternative music’ anyway, when was the last time you even heard that term?!).

After listening to those mixes some hundred times each, I wanted to do an all 90s Australian mix in a similar style. Catchdubs had represented the American side super well, even delved into some UK shit but understandably there was not one Aussie song on any of the mixes. So I had to do my part for my country. Half my favourite songs from that era are from 2000 – 2002 (the final two years of my high school xxxperience) so I had to extend the timeframe a little.

I put together a list of 150 songs that I loved back then and set out on a pretty impossible task of actually finding half of them. So many brilliant old Australian record labels have no presence whatsoever on the internets, many of them just exist as text on a Discogs page, with nowhere to buy their back catalogue. It’s easier to find videosoftheirartists performingonRecoveryonYouTube than it is to find the songs they’re performing.

After raiding my old CD collection at my parents’ house (shouts out to them for not throwing it out yet) and bugging some pals at triple j to raid the music library for me, I had a pretty great collection of old Aussie gold / gold Aussie olds. So here are 26 of those songs, all mixed, just in time for Australia Day (happy that, by the way).

About Levins

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Andrew Levins (known to all as Levins) is a DJ, chef, writer and Dad. He is behind the monthly 90s party The Rhythm of the Night, and is one of the DJs behind Sydney's long running rap party Halfway Crooks.